It's a principle that has proved remarkably durable. Today the expensive private law schools that have succeeded the Inns still contain disproportionate numbers of students from wealthy backgrounds. And only around one in eight Bar Professional Training Course (BPTC) graduates will ever work as a barrister.

So it's no wonder that last Friday's conference on the future of legal education – hosted by the Inner Temple, which these days exists principally as a kind of private dining club for lawyers, while also providing scholarships for law students – was greeted with plenty of cynicism.

Not that law schools' drive to make money and gather power is anything new. When chief legal education duties rested with the Inns – the others are Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn – they used the resultant income to develop extensive property portfolios around the Holborn and Temple area of London.

As their influence grew their headquarters became socially important venues, with Middle Temple and Gray's Inn hosting, respectively, the first ever performances of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Comedy of Errors.

Functions at the Inns' less evocatively named successors, BPP Law School, the College of Law (CoL), Kaplan Law School and City Law School, are of a rather lower key. But the ambition of these institutions is no less fierce. BPP and CoL, in particular, have shown determination to build their own mini-empires, between them establishing eight new branches over the last two years – despite a fall in graduate lawyer jobs in that period.

Putting a check on the law schools' ambitions was a key theme at the event, with speakers Lord Falconer and Lady Deech both backing the imposition of a restriction on the numbers embarking on the costly BPTC. "Ultimately the crushed hopes of so many after the expenditure of £50,000 are not good for the profession," said Falconer, after Bar Standard Boards head Deech had expressed her "determination to go ahead" with an aptitude test restricting entry to the BPTC.

Representatives from the law schools countered with the argument that they were doing all they could to inform students of the mismatch between course places and graduate lawyer jobs.

"The law is an attractive profession. And a success rate of one in 10 is a hell of a lot better than you get with the lottery," said City Law School associate dean Susan Blake.

But there were also reminders of the ambivalent nature of the profession's relationship with the law schools, and the fact that their interests are often aligned. Another speaker, the former Bar Council chairman Nicholas Green, QC, spoke of the dramatic rise in the numbers of paralegals in recent years – a direct result of the simultaneous increase in law school places and squeeze in junior lawyer jobs – while acknowledging that their lower rates "keep costs down" for law firms.

And former Allen & Overy senior partner Guy Beringer argued strongly in favour of the new vocationally-focused two-year law degree recently launched by the CoL – on whose board he sits, having agreed an exclusive deal to educate his old firms' trainees-to-be while in his former post. "The three-year degree is rather leisurely, and obviously lacks a practical element. It will be hard for it to survive," he asserted, provoking outrage from the multiple advocates of a broad-based "liberal education" in the audience.

"Undergraduate students to a large extent have unformed minds," hit back Cambridge University professor Christopher Forsyth. "There is a danger of teaching them to advise before they have a mastery of conceptual thought."

Discussions about diversity were dominated by the usual platitudes about "better mirroring the make up of society" – an ideal the profession consistently fails to live up to, particularly on the issue of new recruits' socio-economic backgrounds. But there were a few thoughtful contributions.

Falconer, for example, identified the lack of connection between state schools and law firms/barristers' chambers, recommending the fostering of better links based on a model successfully employed by Oxford University's Wadham College, which boasts 64% state school-educated students. And Beringer suggested that school-age work experience placements — long the preserve of kids with connections to lawyers — should be formalised, with a central application system allocating slots on a random basis. "That would be a good test of whether people really want broader access," he said.

Deech, meanwhile, urged the profession not to be complacent about its much improved gender balance at entry level, telling the conference that the fee rises would seriously increase the incentive for women to "do a Kate Middleton and snag a wealthy man at uni".

A sprinkling of good ideas and observations, then, amid some predictable hot air. But nothing to suggest that legal education will remain anything other than the preserve of "sons of country gentleman" for a few more centuries yet.

Alex Aldridge is a freelance journalist. He writes about law and education